Why use PlateRate?

PlateRate’s Missions:

1. Create the ultimate dining experience

This means you love everything about your restaurant experience, starting from when you decide which restaurant to go to, getting a reservation or ordering pickup/delivery, enjoying the ambiance and service of the restaurant, helping you find the best tasting food and drink when you’re there, helping you eat comfortably and/or efficiently (whichever you want, or both), and so much more!

2. Help make restaurants as profitable as possible

The restaurant business is difficult and low margin, its particularly challenging during COVID, and we can come in and help restaurants not only survive, but thrive even in a COVID environment.

3. Help PlateRate team members get a valuable skillset in their dream job

Even if they have no prior experience - we’re recruiting, reach out to careers@platerate.guru if this sounds helpful. According to Deloitte, 68% of the US workforce is not engaged at work, we want to fix that!

Best Visionary Product of 2019 Award

We won an award for the Best Visionary Product of 2019 from The Product Group.

The product group has over 30,000 product managers and is a global organization, so it was a great honor to win this award from such a prestigious organization. Learn more here :

https://tpgblog.com/2019/12/15/the-10th-annual-product-management-awards/

Some videos to learn about PlateRate

Earn free food

You can earn up to a 60%+ discount on your favorite food at PlateRatefood at restaurants.

The following credits are cumulative:

Common Credits:

  1. 30% on your first order.

  2. 30% when you try a new top-rated menu item.

Early adopter credits:

  1. Extra 10% if you’re the first person ever to rate something.

  2. Extra 30% if you’re the first to do an Expert Review.

Food that meets your dietary preferences

Eating out for someone that has dietary needs can be a nightmare. PlateRate makes it easy. When you set up your account you tell us your dietary preferences. Just check the boxes. We keep track of over 45 dietary preferences. It doesn’t matter if you have a nut allergy, celiac disease or are a vegetarian, we will make suggestions for you that are verified by the restaurants or crowd sourced from other PlateRate users just like you.

Here’s what it looks like when a vegetarian that prefers organic food when looking at a menu:

menu item reviews

If you say something doesn’t meet your menu item preferences, then you won’t be incentived to try it anymore and it will be removed by default from your menu and anyone who has the same dietary preferences. You will be incentivized to try new menu items until they can meet your dietary preferences.

FlavorMatch - avoid what you don’t like

So many flavors, so many dishes to try, so little time. How many times do you eat out a week, a month, or a year? What if there was a way to know which meals you would like more than others so every meal out or in (can’t live without delivery) would be great.

Have you ever ordered something at a restaurant expecting one thing and it turned out to be something completely different? Or you ordered a dish, and it was the best thing you’ve ever had, and you’d like to try something else like it. With the PlateRate FlavorMatch it is possible.

Too sweet, too spicy, not spicy enough? It doesn’t matter. Part of the menu item review process on PlateRate is adding a guru review where you can rate the full sensory experience: sweet/salty/savory/spicy/bitter/sour.

If you’ve ever watched a cooking competition show on TV, you know how the food is displayed is part of the overall score. You know from personal experience that how your meal looks can affect your overall experience. In the Guru review you can also review plating (how nice a dish looks), serving size, and how healthy it is.

Once everything is entered we create a match score between you and each menu item across restaurants with a guru review.

Notice out of these menu items the Cajun Steak has the highest match score, so you’ll probably like that one the best!

menu item reviews

Find the best anything, anywhere

PlateRate is dedicated to helping you find the best rated anything, anywhere. Just enter what you are looking for with a location, and we will show you who serves it and where to get the highest rated one. We show you the highest rated ones first, not who pays us the most money like the competitors.

Here’s a search for pancakes

menu item reviews

Your personal food journal

We all remember the best and worst food we've had, but we’ll help you remember exactly how much you liked everything you’ve rated. This way you can know whether you should order it again, or order something new.

We’re like a personal food journal to keep track of your favorite food and drinks, anywhere around the world. (yes, PlateRate works internationally!) If you have a great pizza in Napoli, rate it on PlateRate so your friends can find it when they’re traveling to Italy. PlateRate’s food journal capability will make it easy for you to share your favorite foods with all your friends. (they can just look at your profile and see everything you’ve rated!) It’s also a great way to keep track of everything you’ve eaten and exactly how much you liked it.

Share and earn $5 in free food

If you share the app with your friends, and they use the app to earn free food, you earn $5 of free food after your friend’s first order. That’s our way of thanking you for sharing our app with your friends.

Why use PlateRate instead of the competition

We don't accept money to change search results - ever. We're focused on finding you the most useful search results for you. We always provide accurate search based on your request.

More importantly, we charge much less to restaurants than our competitors, so restaurants can not just survive but thrive on your loyal business. We give you big credits to try the highest rated food at our partner restaurants, but you need to be a loyal customer after that for the restaurant to do -- once you are, the restaurant will make far more money when you buy on PlateRate vs. when you buy on competitive platforms like those below

Doordash and other competitors used to stiff their workers on tips customers give:

https://www.businessinsider.com/doordash-delivery-tipping-practices-under-fire-cash-2019-7

Due to all the pressure they agreed to end this practice.

Our major competitors all charge so much that restaurants may not even be profitable on your orders through them

Our fees are much lower, and most of the money we charge restaurants goes back into advertising more for the restaurant.

https://www.crainsnewyork.com/small-business/trump-official-predatory-delivery-apps-are-crushing-city-restaurants

Another competitor - DoorDash - is sharing user information with 3rd party advertising firms without user’s permission:

https://www.igyaan.in/186839/apple-ios-apps-data/

Yelp conflates service ratings with quality of food ratings

Yelp isn’t really a competitor since they sold Eat24 to Seamless/Grubhub, but here’s one reason to use PlateRate in addition to yelp…

Yelp’s rating mainly reflects service, not food quality. PlateRate rates both food quality and service separately so you can find good service, good food, or both -- whatever you’re looking for:

https://www.modernrestaurantmanagement.com/yelp-great-customer-service-always-beats-great-taste/

Yelp partnered with Grubhub, and now when you call a restaurant asking for “Pickup or delivery” from yelp, you’re actually forcing the restaurant to pay a commission to Seamless/Grubhub (do they really deserve that commission? I don’t think so):

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wjwebw/yelp-is-sneakily-replacing-restaurants-phone-numbers-so-grubhub-can-take-a-cut

Grubhub/Seamless sort based on who pays them more money. They steer you to their most profitable customers, not the ones that have the best food (which is what PlateRate does). Here's an example of this in the news:

https://gizmodo.com/stop-using-seamless-1822741251

Main takeaways from the article:

  1. Seamless and Grubhub make more money from some restaurants than others.

  2. They will show you the restaurants that are most profitable for them, even if they’re not the highest rated. You asked for the highest rated restaurants.

  3. This is a pretty clear example of putting profitability before honesty and accuracy, which is something PlateRate will NEVER do. Our first cultural value is integrity, before everything, including profitability.

Here's how you can find proof of this corruption yourself:

If you want proof of this, try going to Seamless/Grubhub’s website and sort by their “Default” sort for restaurants. You'll notice the top restaurants are 5 or 4.5 stars, then it goes down to 4 stars, but then you will see 4.5 star restaurants again below the 4 star restaurants. As the news article states, the 4 star restaurants paid more than the 4.5 star restaurants to be shown above them. Try this test with any other ratings website you use and see if they sort honestly or not. At PlateRate our sort is focused on helping you find the highest rated closest food that meets your search criteria… Our goal is simply to connect you to the best tasting food for you, every time!


PlateRate’s #1 cultural value is integrity first - over everything, including profitability. If you want to support a company that values integrity first, support us by using our app!


In addition, PlateRate dedicates 5-10% of its revenue every year towards doing social good. So by supporting us, you’re helping make the world a better place. For more questions about the social good we plan to do feel free to email us at socialgood@platerate.guru.

We are a company driven towards doing social good

We take 5-10% of our revenues each year (right now we are pre-revenue, and we spend 5-10% of our investment in the company on this) towards training people to do their dream jobs. We are always looking for compassionate team members to join the PlateRate team to pursue their dream jobs… while we can only offer generous equity shares as well as job training right now, we do offer that to those who are interested in collaborating with us. PlateRate has already trained dozens of developers and helped them get their skillset up to par for what’s required to get a full time developer job. We will continue to invest in people who collaborate with us to help them achieve their dream jobs, even if we can’t afford to pay them for it right now (though hopefully with your loyalty and support we’ll be able to hire people to do their dream jobs with PlateRate someday!)

PlateRate has trained people in development, sales, marketing, UX/design, and business development. If you’re interested in collaborating with us please feel free to email us at mydreamjob@platerate.guru telling us what your dream job is. We’ll see if there’s a way we can train you to do dream job and get a little experience with us.

Once our revenues support it, we plan to become B-corp certified.

We want your feedback

If you have an idea for us, or there's something that you don’t like about the site, let us know at feedback@platerate.guru. We read every piece of feedback we get! We want to build your dream food-tech app, and we hope we’re off to a good start in doing so. But if we’re not, please let us know what would get us there!

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/deloitte-study-only-13-percent-of-the-us-workforce-is-passionate-about-their-jobs-300469952.html